Friday, June 19, 2009

How Does Online Participation Affect Your Self-Concept?

Reference: Fang, Y. and Neufeld, D. (2009), Understanding Sustained Participation in Open Source Software Projects, Journal of Management Information Systems 25:4, pp. 9–50.

The title for this blog entry appears to have nothing to do with this article, but bear with me.

The article examines why people remain involved in open source software projects. It turns out that a great deal has been written about why people get involved in the first place, but not a lot about why they remain for any length of time. My going-in assumption was that people work on open source projects for the same reasons that they get involved with charitable work -- that they feel a connection of some type to the principle and they want to give back to society. So, it would surprise me if the reasons that they joined were substantially different from the reasons that they continue to participate over time. But, according to the authors, that's not the case with open source software. They get involved generally because they have or see a need for a particular product or function. Once that need is met, they don't necessarily remain involved with the project.

So, what keeps them involved? The answer, according to this research, is a combination of "situated learning" and "identity construction". The theory behind this is the theory of "Legitimate Peripheral Participation," formulated by Lave and Wenger*. "Situated learning," as I understand it, is learning by doing and learning in context, emphasizing the social and problem solving aspects of learning. It makes perfect sense that people will remain involved with an open source project if it feeds their learning, so I'm not surprised at that conclusion. I can see a parallel as well with participation in charitable ventures. If you're only given boring tasks with no opportunity to use and develop your skills, you might opt out after a short while.

That brings us to identity construction. The authors seem to define identity construction largely from an external perspective. Construction of a community member's identity is the "process of understanding who one is, what one can do, and to what extent one becomes more or less legitimized and valued by the other members." This is not an entirely external perspective because it acknowledges the development of a self-understanding, but it is in relation to how the person is perceived by others. The theory is that positive identity construction reinforces a positive self-image, leading to the desire to continue to participate or even increase participation.

It is the relationship between identity construction and participation that interests me because it is clearly a driving force for participation in social networks. I see it all the time, or at least I think I do. I believe that people often feel obliged to tweet on Twitter because they know it affects how others perceive them, it increases the number of their followers, and it feeds their self worth. I feel that they participate on Facebook in large part to build an identity for those who might not know them well. Of course, in both cases, these are not the only reasons for participating, but I'm curious as to how important identity construction is to participation in these networks. It would be a good research project.

The Fang and Neufeld article confirms the hypothesis that identity construction affects participation, at least in the open software community of interest. But, I'd also be interested to learn if the reverse is true. Does participation affect identity construction, as I believe it does in social networking? The evidence the authors present in their tables seems to confirm this as well, but they never make this feedback loop explicit.

* Lave, J., and Wenger, E. Situated Learning—Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1990.